Mabele eleki lola ! at Tervuren

TERVUREN—Nearly two years after its reopening in December of 2018, the AfricaMuseum is presenting its first temporary exhibition.
Until February 21, 2021, the public will be able to experience a dialog between twenty-two site specific installations by Congolese artist Freddy Tsimba and a selection of about thirty traditional African artworks drawn from the museum’s collections.
The brainchild of author and exhibition curator In Koli Jean Bofane, the show was developed with academic contributions by Henry Bundjoko, director of the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Kinshasa. The title, Mabele eleki lola! The Earth, Brighter than Paradise, alludes to the need to celebrate existence, to live in the present, and to maintain the resilience to do so—qualities that the Congolese demonstrate every day of their lives.
The concept is developed in the exhibition galleries through face-to-face encounters between Tsimba’s monumental works, which deal with essential topics 
in the structure of contemporary Congolese society such as religion, the role of women, or violence, and the ancestral memory that traditional older objects such as Salampasu masks, a Kongo kangi kiditu crucifix, and Kongo maternities, among other objects, bring to the fore. These oppositions are not mere intellectual constructs.
They assume a living and symbolic dimension through Tsimba’s membership in the lineage of “Great Blacksmiths.” The event offers perspective on the museum’s historical collection that emanates from actors on the contemporary African cultural scene. The show is a manifestation of the AfricaMuseum’s desire to encourage the reappropriation of its holdings and to contribute to a profound transformation of the museums that are repositories for the patrimonies of territories that were once under colonial domination.

Practical information:
Mabele eleki lola !
Africamuseum, Tervuren
Until  21 February 2021

ABOVE: View of the exhibition "Mabele Eleki Lola !" MRAC, Tervuren.
Photo © Tribal Art magazine.

ABOVE: View of the exhibition "Mabele Eleki Lola !" MRAC, Tervuren.
Photo © Tribal Art magazine.

ABOVE: Freddy Tsimba (b. 1967), Série Rescapés, no. 512, 2016.

Melted bushings, chains.

Private collection, Braine-le-Comte.
Photo: J.-M. Vandyck.
© MRAC Tervuren.

ABOVE: Mask, dipola. Salampasu; Masuika, Kasaï-Central Province, DR Congo.
Before 1950.
Wood, copper, brass, vegetal fiber, pigment, turaco feathers.

MRAC Tervuren, donated by 
H. Bogaerts, 1950, inv. EO.1950.14.6.
Photo: J.-M. Vandyck. © MRAC Tervuren.